Less is More: Week 205 Colour Challenge- I love you 24-7

The challenge for today by Less is More is a colour challenge, with the card needing to have black, metallic and another colour of my choice but it has to be mainly white space. I decided to make a love themed card as I'm getting into the Valentine's Day spirit with it being less that five weeks away! I am often scared to use an all white background as I feel the card isn't finished, usually opting for a piece of patterned paper to act as a backdrop instead, but I realised that I needed to trust the use of open space to really focus on what the card was saying. I also decided to banish the multitude of critters I had been using on many of the cards I made last year to really challenge myself (if you aren't going to challenge yourself in the first week of a new year when are you going to!).

My first choices when I sat down to make the card was what other colour to use on the card, I opted for a water coloured piece of paper from my scraps draw (my scraps draw is going to be getting a lot of love this year) that had been made with Distress Ink in Peacock Feathers and lots and lots and lots of water so its a really muted colour on the card to harmonise with the white of the card base. After much consideration I decided to stamp out the sentiment from the Unity Stamp set You and Me in Versafine Onyx Black ink and die cut it (although I had to trace the heart shape as it was too large and fussy cut) out using a stackable heart die from My Favourite Things. I then used Liquid Pearls in Rouge to the heart on the sentiment and it turned into a horrible mess because the heart was an awkward shape (yes I admit I made a mistake)! I had to redo the sentiment and heart cut out and then got one of my teeny heart dies (I can't remember where its from) and cut a white heart out of some scrap white cardstock. The teeny heart didn't quite cover the original heart I was replacing it with so I cheated and coloured over the black with a Uni-ball Signo in Angelic. I then put a small foam square on the teeny heart and carefully positioned it over the original heart, I then covered the teeny heart in the Liquid Pearls in Rouge which gave it a lovely red metallic 3D coating.

When I was about to stick down the sentiment heart using foam squares for more dimension I realised that I couldn't leave the background totally white as the 5x5 inch card as to me the card didn't look finished! I decided that because you can't do tone on tone stamping using white I needed to use some Dreamweavers Crackle Embossing Paste and used the Mini HalftoneCircles stencil from The Crafters Workshop for a little bit of interest. I chose the crackle paste over the regular because it adds more interest to the background. I left everything to properly dry and then added the heart sentiment to the lower right section of the card to emphasise the white space.

I hope you feel inspired by this card and if you wish to play along yourself click here to do so.